Descent of Inanna to the Underworld
c. 1900–1700 BCE · Ur III to Old Babylonian · Nippur
transliteration
an-gal-ta ki-gal-še
*This translation is not currently available.* The Descent of Inanna survives on Sumerian clay tablets excavated from Nippur and Ur across multiple seasons of fieldwork. The text was assembled gradually from scattered fragments held in different museum collections; the first complete English translation appeared in the 1950s and remains under copyright. We are actively exploring ways to include this text. Subscribe to our email list at anunnaki.ai for updates when new texts are added.
notes
The Descent of Inanna (Sumerian: d-inanna kur-ra e3-a) is one of the oldest and most complex pieces of literature in human history, dating to approximately 1900–1600 BCE. It survives in multiple tablet fragments excavated at Nippur, Ur, and Susa, with the most complete text assembled by Samuel Noah Kramer from over 100 fragments. The poem belongs to a cycle of texts concerning Inanna (the Sumerian goddess of love, war, and fertility, later syncretised with the Akkadian Ishtar) and her consort Dumuzi, the shepherd-king. Its narrative structure — descent, death, and rebirth — is one of the earliest literary expressions of seasonal mythology and the first known account of a journey to the land of the dead. The seven gates of the underworld and the progressive stripping of Inanna's divine regalia are among the most psychologically resonant images in ancient literature. Each garment represents a divine attribute or office; arriving naked before Ereshkigal, Inanna has been stripped of everything that defines her power and identity. This reversal is central to the poem's theology: the underworld cannot be entered on mortal terms. Ereshkigal (Great Lady Earth) is Inanna's dark counterpart — older, ruling the land of the dead, mourning. Her function is not simple villainy; she enforces the laws of the underworld, which even the great gods Enlil and Nanna cannot override. Only Enki, through cunning rather than force, finds a way. The kurgarra and galatur — asexual beings fashioned from dirt — can enter the underworld and leave it because they have no divine offices to surrender. They rescue Inanna through empathy, mirroring Ereshkigal's pain back to her. This is the first therapeutic encounter in recorded literature. Dumuzi's fate — chosen by Inanna herself as her substitute — is the poem's most disturbing inversion: the beloved husband not mourning at all, seated on his throne in splendour, becomes the one condemned. His escape and transformation into a snake, his sister Geshtinanna's protection, and the final settlement dividing the year between siblings in the underworld explain the Sumerian model of seasons and the annual disappearance of pastoral abundance. The text was translated by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer (1983) and made available through the ETCSL corpus (University of Oxford). The composite translation presented here follows scholarly reconstructions from surviving tablet fragments, with lacunae marked. Gaps in the tablet sequence are indicated where the joining of fragments is uncertain.
currently held: Multiple museums; University of Pennsylvania Museum
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